something to tide you over for GoT
Month: August 2014
Uber astroturfing
dumb, and creating an opening for various taxi commissions to justify bans.
Uber is arming teams of independent contractors with burner phones and credit cards as part of its sophisticated effort to undermine Lyft and other competitors.
Transparent solar
while these are only 1% efficient at the moment, this opens up a lot of extra real estate for solar. at some point you can just default to these for window installations. for comparison, other types reach efficiencies up to 40%
Michigan State University researchers have developed a new type of solar concentrator that when placed over a window creates solar energy while allowing people to see through the window.
SaviOne
the R2D2 sound royalties consumed a majority of the venture funding.
What’s the matter with PGP?
If Will Smith looked like this when your cryptography was current, you need better cryptography. Poking through a modern OpenPGP implementation is like visiting a museum of 1990s crypto.
Digitizing weather
probably a race against time, too. yet another case where analog data is pretty much equivalent with no data.
How to Track Climate Change? Digitize a Century’s Worth of Moldy Old Records, Scientists are embarking on data rescue missions all over the world to find and save old climate information.
What makes us fat
the problem with nutrition research is that it isn’t rigorous, due to funding problems. the NIH spends very little on these studies, a missed opportunity now being fixed by a new consortium.
Somatic mutations
If somatic mutations are common in healthy bodies, then biomedical researchers can no longer assume that DNA aberrations point toward the causes of disease. Doctors won’t be able to trust that the DNA found in a blood or saliva sample actually reflects the gene sequences in the heart or the liver. Should somatic variation turn out to be not just common but also good for you, it will undermine the longstanding presumption that the healthiest genome gets replicated with perfect fidelity. The most highly functional bodies may be the ones that permit a little mutation, that encourage a certain amount of genetic wildness and disorder within
not only are you 90% bacterial, but the human parts of you can’t get their shit together.
within our bodies our cells are not all created equal at the genomic level. In other words, we are mosaics.
Viruses most ancient life?
these viruses “represent a form of life that either predated or coexisted with the most recent organism from which all other organisms on Earth are descended. If giant viruses are as old as Caetano-Anolles’ calculated, the implications are staggering. It means that a giant virus or one of its ancestors existed before other types of life and may have played a major role in shaping life as we know it. This could mean that viruses are one of the dominant evolutionary forces on this planet and that each organism has a deep, viral past.
2021-09-01: See also Giruses, giant viruses, which may have been there since the beginning.
The Onion Art Department
Where The Onion gets truly weird is in its faux-local coverage–the archetypical “Area Man.” Area Man is one of The Onion’s longest-running memes, a take on the silliness and pomposity given to local schlubs by local news teams. But since none of these stories actually happened, The Onion’s art department has to create, from scratch, 1000s of different “everyday” scenarios. Some recent ones: “Area Man Pretty Sure He Knows Which Athletes Are Gay,” “Area Man Too Poor To Afford Movers, Too Old To Get Help From His Friends,” “Area Man Lacks Star Power Necessary To Carry Major Motion Picture.” These images call for subtle, banal shots, which can become totally forgettable or sell the joke by giving it the weight of a constructed world.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 